The importance of backward or inbound links to your website is still a valuable asset and counts toward how well it ranks in the search engine results. Some would say it is the most valuable, and as always, there is debate in the SEO circles as to how much. None the less it is not something you can ignore.
One of the many things about backward links to consider is what’s called the anchor text. In simple terms the anchor text is the text that makes up the actual link back to your website. For example, businesses for sale is linked to the domain, biz4salefinder.com. In this case the anchor text would be “businesses for sale”. The link itself would be: https://www.biz4salefinder.com. Often the anchor text is the link or URL itself, www.biz4salefinder.com or something generic like, “click here”.
The search engines take into consideration the anchor text when ranking pages for keywords. They not only take into consideration the actual anchor text, but also the surrounding text, the title attribute in the A tag, the general semantic content of the page that the link is on and a number of other factors.
If at all possible take advantage of the anchor text and use relevant keywords to link back to your website. In the above example the anchor text “businesses for sale” would “boost” ranking for the particular webpage for the keyword phrase, “businesses for sale”.
Remember that over use of anchor text for a particular keyword or keyword phrase can be considered negative and keyword spam by the search engines. It is generally agreed that varying your anchor text for inbound links is a good idea. Semantic variance is a good thing. Using the above example, various terms and phrases that say essentially the same thing like; selling a business, selling businesses, business for sale, business classifieds, are all good and related semantically to “businesses for sale”.
